Say you have a <textarea> and you want to retrieve info about the number of:

• Characters (total)
• Characters (no spaces)
• Words
• Lines

function wordCount( val ){
    var wom = val.match(/\\S+/g);
    return {
        charactersNoSpaces : val.replace(/\\s+/g, '').length,
        characters         : val.length,
        words              : wom ? wom.length : 0,
        lines              : val.split(/\\r*\\n/).length
    };
}

// Use like:
wordCount( someMultilineText ).words;   // (Number of words)

jsFiddle example